WHY isn’t Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, a parent and a family man, listening? The Conservative Woman is not alone in being alarmed by the Department for Education’s Relationship and Sex Education curriculum reforms planned to be introduced in schools in September. We have been urging Mr Williamson to get a grip on the pornographic and inappropriate content of lesson schemes for some time as well as warning him about the undue influence over this part of the curriculum by aggressive LGBTQ lobbies and organisations, as I did again yesterday in these pages.
Perhaps Mr Williamson’s intentions are good. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. If there are good DfE approved RSE resources out there, produced by mainstream providers, I have not come across them, and I have researched this area thoroughly. I have searched for good science-based resources to teach children the facts about sex and biology, and for good ethics-based resources to guide discussion on behaviour and morality, but all I have found is over-sexualised material, misinformation, and never-ending gender ideology. The way this is heading, our children are to be taught that sex is a spectrum, that they have an inner gender identity which may not correspond to their anatomy, that ‘demi-sexuals’ are something they need to learn about. Only if they are lucky will they avoid the porn. I set this all out here and here as well as yesterday.
To say that many parents are worried about these materials is an understatement. They know, as I do, that far from keeping our children safe, they risk doing great harm. It cannot be unrelated to the prevalence of gender identity ideology permeating social media that there has been an exponential increase in the number of children and teenagers attending gender identity clinics, worried that they were born in the wrong body, seeking or being offered puberty blockers and potentially cross-sex hormones. The long-term health impacts are as yet unknown, but there is little to suggest they can possibly be anything other than physically risky, potentially irreversible and psychologically damaging.
If gender ideology is to be taught as fact in schools, where should children turn for dispassionate help? To whom do parents turn? So far, it is not the Government.
That’s why concerned parents and groups are mobilising to fight back. Included in this effort to resist this indoctrination and to fight back are the Safe Schools Alliance and Transgender Trend. These groups have produced alternative resources, have gathered testimony from parents and children, and are engaged in groundbreaking legal action. It is thanks to the Safe Schools Alliance team that ‘trans toolkits’ are now being withdrawn from many schools and the Crown Prosecution Service has withdrawn advice that it is transphobic and potentially a hate crime to challenge the gender ideology narrative.
Another group playing a key role is the Values Foundation. This week they have launched a petition challenging Gavin Williamson to do four things to salvage his RSE reforms. These are:
· Parliament must set up a new independent RSE watchdog committee regarding the RSE curriculum and its influence throughout the school, with a protected whistleblowing process;
· Schools must display RSE resources and providers on school websites and state whether the school promotes gender theory in any form;
· Inappropriate RSE resources must be blacklisted;
· All RSE teaching must be compatible with the science curriculum.
We think these are the right demands and that this petition should be supported. Gender ideology doesn’t just threaten the safety and sanity of our children. It undermines the basis of our society in science and reason and shared accepted language. You can see the full petition plus write-up here.
If you support it – please sign and share with friends.
